


Folding Chairs

by RegentOfTheAuxArcs



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Anger Management, Crack Treated Seriously, Ezra Bridger Needs a Hug, Force Bond (Star Wars), Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, SPOILERS FOR THE END OF REBELS, So does Maul, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, but proceed with caution, flappy bird - Freeform, what happened after space whales, you know he didn't stay in the dirt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-07 22:55:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14091498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RegentOfTheAuxArcs/pseuds/RegentOfTheAuxArcs
Summary: After everything that happened, Ezra sought out formerly-Darth-now-just-Maul because honestly, what else can he do at this point? But if this is going to work out AT ALL, Maul's got some stuff he desperately needs to work on. Ezra has ideas.





	Folding Chairs

**Author's Note:**

> My husband hates Flappy Bird. My friend Max demanded SW fluff with Flappy Bird. I was listening to Regina Spektor's Folding Chair. This happened.  
> Enjoy, Max!

Somewhere off on a backwater ice-ball in Wild Space, two men were processing their weird reunion in very different ways. This definitely wasn’t the planned place, or time, or circumstances, or really anything, but it came sooner rather than later, and they at least had that to be glad about.  
That was about it, however.

“SON OF A BITCH!”  
Banging and a sound not unlike throwing pots and pans down a flight of stairs came from under the ship. Ezra Bridger had a good buzz going, but the calamity under him was starting to harsh it. If this was going to work out in any sense at all (oh believe me, he'd considered the options here, and he still wasn’t 100% sold on his half-baked idea in the first place, but the Ghost Fam hadn’t found him yet and he had to do something with himself until they did), Maul was going to have to learn the art of chill. Since he was completely opposed to Ezra’s form of pain and anxiety management, this would call for some of his patented ingenuity. The banging and swearing continued (this time not even in Galactic Basic, wow), so Ezra cracked the window and flipped open his datapad to do something mindless and figure out a solution. Unorthodox men called for unorthodox methods.

“At least open a window if you must do that in my quarters,” Maul groused, exhausted from the protracted fistfight with the inanimate object several hours later.  
“I did.”  
“Oh," Maul wrinkled his nose and flopped back on his bunk.  
“Look, we’ve got to talk about something.”  
“Everything hurts and I’ll shower when it doesn’t.”  
“Not that, but I’d really appreciate that anyway,” Ezra sighed and rolled his eyes. “I get that you didn’t have anything resembling a functional upbringing, and you’re kind of behind on stuff like this, but you’ve got some serious anger management issues.”  
“I have no such thing.”  
“Oh no, no no, you do. You’re so used to yourself that it probably looks normal. But seriously, if you want this to work out in any capacity…”  
“So you’ve considered apprenticeship after all?” Maul cut him off.  
“…Maul, no, I’m not your apprentice…anyway, as I was saying, if this is going to work, you need to learn to calm the fuck down. I recognize this is probably what you think fuels your whole dark side thing, but I’m a living testament to the fact that stuff other than wrath works just as fine.”  
Maul was scandalized for just a moment, but when he considered his position in the matter—temporarily stranded on this cold, empty world, but stranded here with the last person in the galaxy that he cared about, who he thought had been torn away just like everyone else, who was telling him he had a problem—perhaps he did.  
“What have you got in mind?”  
“I thought you’d never ask.”

Ezra crawled up into the bunk entirely too close and held out Maul’s own datapad to him.  
“I thought this stayed behind in the dirt,” he said, turning it over in his hands.  
“When I went to find you and saw the state of things there, you didn’t think the first thing I did was tried to dig you up and make sure you were really dead? This and some clothes scraps and credit chips is all I found.”  
The words felt foreign to use, but it was as good a time as any to practice them.  
“Ezra, thank you.”  
“Okay, don’t thank me yet. I did kind of have to jailbreak it and wreck your security suite, but before you get too mad, I installed something for you.”  
While Maul re-familiarized himself with the pad, Ezra pulled up the blankets and stuffed them into a sort of nest. It jogged a memory, but it was too far back to really recall it. Maul squashed back the strange feel and mild anxiety it gave him and flipped through the functions until he noticed something strange.  
“What in Bane’s Drawers is this nonsense? I don’t remember having this application installed.”  
“Open it,” Ezra was smiling, clearly there was skullduggery afoot. “I’ll teach you something for once.”  
Music chimed and a brightly-coloured cartoon screen popped up.  
It said, “Flappy Bird”.

Maul’s nostrils flared.  
“Ezra, I don’t have time for—”  
“You said you’d work on the rage thing, right? Look, this will help.”  
He folded his hands over Maul’s on the control pad and Maul realized how much larger they’d gotten since the last time they’d seen each other. He released a breath he didn’t realize he was holding.  
“Okay, so the objective is to get the bird through the obstacle course without dying. I’ll do this easy one with you so you can get the hang of it.”  
“And just how is this going to help?”  
“Trust me, it will. You’ll be desensitized to this after a while, but you can’t fly off the handle every time the courses get hard and stupid. You sure can’t throw this thing either, mine doesn’t have as long a range as yours does. Ready?”  
“Fine, fine. Do this one with me. I can do the rest myself.”

Maul couldn’t say he enjoyed the stupid bird game, but he appreciated the…what, intimacy? He didn’t know what to call it, but the bond that lay dormant for so long sparked awake and the warmth was enough to at least get the engine and landing gear fixed without incident. Every time he dropped a screwdriver down too far in to reach, sheared a screw, snapped a wrench clean apart, he stopped for a minute and thought of Flappy Bird and didn’t get quite so pissed about it all anymore. Ezra felt pretty accomplished and didn’t actually mind being parked in this glorified tin can out on the abandoned ice beach for a while as long as Maul tried.  
Maybe this could work after all.


End file.
